Since 1992 I was every year in Nový
Jičín for 3 consecutive years. In these years I was
present in Nový
Jičín, the town of my birth, every year. My brother
Shragga instituted a prize at the Nový
Jičín gymnasium for pupils who wrote essays every year
on any Jewish subjects. The object was to teach awareness among the Czechs of
what occurred during the Shoah. The 3rd year 1994, the gymnasium
requested that the prize should continue for pupils to write on any subject. By
this time Shragga had died and his widow said that the prize should continue
dealing with Jewish subjects as constituted by Shragga in 1992. The professor
who was administering the scheme said that making the essays be written only on
Jewish subjects was racist. My sister in law took offence and the scheme was
unfortunately stopped.

I had spent four years from 1938, the
occupation of the Sudetenland, till 14th Sept. 1942 in Valaské
Meziříčí and started my
Shoah on
that fateful date. Valaské Meziříčí
is different from Nový
Jičín
in that it was always a Czech town and to some extent the relationship to Jews
was more relaxed than in Nový
Jičín
which had a majority of its population German. The fact that the above site was
posted on the internet helped me to persuade the town council in 1998 to
consider putting up a memorial to their neighbours who were killed.

I started the work of making the list of
the victims in 1994 and by 1998 I took the list to the Mayor to put to him what
I thought was the towns obligation. I said to him that the Germans killed the
people on the list which includes two of my brothers and my mother, but that the
town of Valaské Meziříčí
killed any memory of these Jews who were neighbours of the townspeople of
Valaské Meziříčí.
The circumstances are that during the communist time and the Slansky trial in
the 1950s there was more or less official Anti-Semitism although this was
actually illegal in communist states. But during this time Valaské
Meziříčí demolished the synagogue to make way for a fire brigade station which,
in the event, was never built. But they also demolished the Jewish cemetery.
Not only that, in 1945 there was a battle for the town and approximately 250
German soldiers, many of them from the SS fell during the attack by the Red
Army. The Red Army had a simple rule about enemy dead. Each was buried at the site where he fell. This meant
that there were 250 graves scattered throughout the town.

The Russians made a map and a list,
based on the tags of the fallen soldiers and gave the data to the new Czech
mayor. The then German Democratic Government came up a few years later and
wished that the German fallen should be buried in a military cemetery somewhere
on the outskirts of the town. The good people of Valaské
Meziříčí were then represented by a communist town council and they decided to
bury the German dead at the site of the demolished Jewish cemetery. The town
council also lost the map so that each individual soldier could not be
identified with the details on the Red Army list. The town council and the GDR
decided to make a mass grave for the about 250 skeletons. A bulldozer dug
through the Jewish graves to make a large excavation, but then due to rain the
sides of the excavation collapsed. To solve this problem the town council
decided to use the bricks from the surrounding brick wall of the Jewish cemetery
to reinforce the excavation made. The GDR paid the town council 1250 DM for
every German skeleton reburied.

By the time I came to the site with the mayor in 1998 there
was a very tall wooden cross at the top of the rise of the erstwhile Jewish
cemetery site. The cross overlooked about 250 small individual crosses with the
names of the German dead. In 1994 I discovered 12 Jewish gravestones which were
hidden there in a thicket at the site by the protestant pastor, a Mr.
ilinski who was given orders in the 1950s to clear the
cemetery. He did not feel too comfortable about the task but as he said to me
in 1994 he had to obey the instruction lest he should find himself in a
communist jail. The 12 gravestones he arranged secretly in the shape of the
Star of David to indicate to the Almighty that this was once consecrated ground
of a Jewish cemetery.

I already knew the above story from my
searches at the archive of Vsetín, but the desecration
shook me. The mayor started explaining to me that the town intend to create on
the site of the Jewish cemetery an international park of remembrance which in
its midst would have a holocaust memorial to the Jewish victims during World War
II. He told me that Turkey had already agreed to commemorate their dead from
world war I who died in a Valaské Meziříčí
hospital. He continued that the town council is in touch with Russia also to
build a memorial to the Russian fallen of World War II. He said that the dead
will not feel their differences if they are all together.

We turned back down the hill toward the car park and I was
trying to figure what I should say to such a proposal. When we got to the
mayors car I said to him:

You are mistaken if you think that visitors from abroad
would come to visit Valaské Meziříčí to see such an
international memorial park. I continued saying that any Jew who would come to
the car park and would see the tall wooden cross over the German monument would
get right back into their cars and leave, because I said monuments are built for
the living, not for the dead!

It took the town council another four years, up to 2002, to
decide that they should erect a memorial to the Jewish victims of the Holocaust
on the site of the demolished synagogue in the middle of town. This proposal I
accepted and by 13th Sept., 2004, 62 years after our deportation I
unveiled a memorial which the town had erected.

Michael Honey placing a stone on the place on
the memorial where his mother and two brothers are inscribed

The demolition and subsequent desecration of the Jewish
cemetery now cannot be undone. In 1990 I first visited Valaské
Meziříčí during the velvet revolution when the communist government in
Czechoslovakia fell. I was shocked to see that we had completely disappeared.
There was no sign anywhere that we ever lived there. Four years later I was
searching for data to make a list of the Jewish people who were killed during
the German occupation. The archive of Valaské
Meziříčí is actually in Vsetín, the district town some 10 Km south of
Valaské Meziříčí. The director of the archive a Dr.
Ladislav Baletka was very supportive of my work, he is also a member of the town
council and by 1998 when I finished the list he introduced me to the then mayor
Ing. Bohdán
Mikuek.

In Sept., 2002 the town council
instituted the project and called for proposals from architects for a design of
an appropriate memorial. I was invited to be present and initiate the project
for the town. By this time there had been new elections and the mayor became a
Mr. Jiří Kubea, the previous mayor was still on the
town council as was Dr. Baletka. I was assured by the new mayor that the
project would continue. By 13th Sept., 2004 I unveiled on behalf of
the town the Holocaust Memorial. There were two days of ceremonies to which
were invited other guests including;

On 14.9.04 it will be the 62nd
anniversary of the transport of the last of the Jews who left Val. Mezirici to
the ghetto Theresienstadt. JUDr. Karel Heller, president of this community, his
wife Ani, their two little girls Jana and Mira together with their grandmother
on the mothers side Rosa Flach née
Hoffman,
Gen.5 from Karvina were specially kept back for one month. One evening the road
of their house was sealed off and all people were advised to stay indoors. The
family was loaded onto a truck and taken to Ostrava. The family without
Ani was
included in the next transport to Theresienstadt. Ani was taken separately
straight to Auschwitz and killed. It is not known what trespass Ani committed
to deserve such special treatment. We can only assume that it was some
important act of resistance.

I
prepared a listing already in 1994 of all victims of Valasske Mezirici and asked
the town council to commemorate these neighbors from this small town in Moravia,
Czech Republic where all of them disappeared. The communist authorities of the
town demolished the synagogue and the Jewish cemetery in the 50s during the
Stalinist anti-Semitism at the time of the infamous Slansky process. Thus
communism completed the Shoah which the Germans started. The Germans killed the
people and the Czech Communists obliterated all traces of them. But the town
council decided to try and make good the wrong which they committed. On 14th
Sept., next I will be unveiling a memorial to the victims of the Shoah on the
site of the demolished synagogue. The memorial will bear the names of the
victims and the inscription used at Yad Vashem for the Valley of the
communities; Psalm 78, verse 6 first in Hebrew and then in Czech: למען ידעו דור אחרון בנים יולדו
יקומו ויספרו לבניהם"In order that the last generation will bear children, arise and
tell their sons."

THE NAMES

Hereunder
is a list of the Jewish victims who perished in the Shoah from the Community of
Valasske Mezirici. It was prepared by Michael Honey (formerly Misa
Honigwachs), a survivor.

The research of data showed how the Germans
organized the Shoah in the Protectorate. Mr. Honey writes that he is sure that
Valasske Mezirici is a typical example of how they did it.

In the list you see how in the period March 1939 to
Sept., 1942 the Germans removed young and capable people, all professionals,
teachers and the like, also many of the rich. These were a phase 1 elimination
at the early time when the mass gassings were not yet in full swing.

The people died individually in various
concentration camps and urns of ashes would arrive back with the sad news that
the individual died.

From May 1942 to Sept. 1942 all young people were
billeted at the Zemsky Statek Branky (District Farm of Branky) for agricultural
work. Branky is a village about 4 Km west of Valasske Mezirici. We only know one
survivor of a group of about 40 people, all the others perished.

On 12th Sept., 1942 the rest of the
community were shipped to Terezin. Most were the aged and children.

When I first arrived in England in 1945 and started
to learn English I was 16. I read the question posed by Hannah Arend; "How could
6 million people go to the gas chambers without resistance?" At that time I
could not begin to answer this question, but now I begin to understand partly
through the research on the list enclosed.

It was an extermination
camp at which hundreds of thousands of people were killed in the years 1941 to 1943. It
operated similar to Chelmno in that the people were put on lorries at a railhead
and driven to the camp. The lorries had the exhaust directed back into the space
of the lorry so that by the time the lorries arrived at the camp the people were
asphyxiated.

Those lorries of Maly Trostenec were
meant for me. But I was saved by my brother Leo and Freddy Hirsch, the Maccabi
Hatzair youth leader who was murdered by Jewish prisoners who were being saved
by Mengele when the September transport to the Familienlager was liquidated.

Village in eastern Byelorussia located 7.5 miles east
of Minsk; camp and site of mass murder of Jews. About 200,000 people were
murdered in the Trostinets area. About 65,000 were killed in Maly Trostinets,
including over 30,000 from the last major aktion in Minsk.

Between
July 28-31, 1942 and on October 21, 1943 the last Jews from Minsk were murdered
and buried in Maly Trostinets and Bolshoi Trostinets.

During
1942, Jews from Germany, the Netherlands, Poland, Austria, and the Protectorate
of Bohemia and Moravia were brought by train to be killed in Maly Trostinets.
Most of the victims were lined up in front of large pits and shot. Tractors then
flattened the pits out. The prisoners in the camp were forced to sort through
the victims' possessions and maintain the camp. They occasionally underwent
selections. This happened more frequently during 1943.

In the fall
of 1943 the Nazis begun to destroy all evidence of mass murder by burning
bodies in the nearby village of Blagoveshchenie. Soviet Prisoners Of War were forced to rake through the ashes looking
for gold. As the Soviet army approached in June 1944, the Germans killed most of
the remaining prison­ers. On June 30 the Germans completely destroyed the camp.
When the Soviets arrived on July 3, 1944, they found a few Jews who had escaped.

In Bolshoi
Trostinets1) stand today a memorial which says:

"Here
in the area of Trostinets the Germans murdered and burnt 201,500 souls,
peaceful citizens, Partisans and Soviet P.O.W."

I have checked the Terezin cards, deportees from France and from Holland and
this family does not appear to have fallen into the clutches of the Germans.
This means that they may have survived the Shoah by leaving the Netherlands. I
am looking for this family as I need to make sure that their names should not be
included on the above list of victims who were killed.

I wrote the above in 1999 when the website was first listed. I
had no people contact me with information. But I kept looking. In July 2001
there was an international conference of Jewish Genealogy in London. I then
lived in London and gave one of the conference lectures. During the intervals
between sessions of the conference there was an area for rest and coffee. I sat
down at a table with a Rene Van Wijngaarde from Holland, I did not know him. He
was visiting the conference from Holland. As we chatted I told him the above
story because it concerned Eindhoven in Holland and I complained how nobody came
forward to solve the riddle of the whereabouts of this Family Meisel.

I asked him if police registrations of people arriving in a town and of leaving
exist in Holland as they still do in the Czech Republic. He answered in the
affirmative and said that all I needed to do was to write to the town archive in
Eindhoven. I asked him if he would be so kind and find for me the E-mail No and
or the address of the archive and could I telephone him after the conference. A
few days after the conference I had the number and I append the following
correspondence with the archive;

I have done several years of research in order to
establish a list of Jewish victims of the holocaust who were from Valasske
Mezirici in Moravia, the former Czechoslovakia. This town is like many in
Europe that has lost its Jews entirely.

I have been further looking into some younger members
of families who attempted to leave. One such family originated from this town
and moved to live in Vienna. In 1938 when the Austrian Anschluss occurred
they took refuge back in their home town. Discerning the danger to
Czechoslovakia they left for Eidhoven.

I have the following data;

JUDr. Leopold Meisel,
b. on the following possible dates

17th Jan., 1880 - 19th Jan., 1894 or 4th Aug., 1895

his wife Gertrud Meisel
(nee Heller),
b.17th Jan. 1891 in

Valasske Mezirici, elder sister of JUDr. Karel Heller

their son Gerhard Meisel,
b. Vienna 9th Sep., 1915

their daughter Tereza Meisel,
b.Vienna 22nd Sep., 1919

The data comes from police files of arrival/departure
registrations in Valasske Mezirici. Shortly after their arrival in Valasske
Mezirici they are registered as departing for Eindhoven on 8th June, 1938. I
wonder if in the Netherlands there was or is also the registration of people
arriving and departing as is still the rule now in the Czech Republic.

I have checked the various memorial books and this
family do not appear to have been deported by the Germans. I wonder if your
records show how this family left Eindhoven.

Your help with this information would be very much
appreciated. If you are interested the data I have researched is published on;

According to the registration in Eindhoven, the fam.
Meisel came to this city on 14 Feb. 1939. Leopold was born on 17th Jan. 1880 in
Zlin (Czechoslovakia).

The family departed on the 2nd May 1939 for Cambridge
(England).

Good luck with your research.

Greetings,

J. Suijkerbuijk

* * *

Aftermath

This is the first confirmation which I had that this family were victims of the
Shoah, but that they managed to escape deportation by the Germans. All over
Europe there are police registrations of movements of people, but not in England
and not in the US either. Now how to look for them after 61 years? I decided
on the telephone book. I started to look up past records of numbers in
Cambridge to no avail. Refugees arriving in England in 1939 were not likely to
have a telephone registered in their name. But during fiddling about with the
phonebooks the helpline said to search for the name in a bigger region than just
the town of Cambridge. So just for the heck of it I put in Cambridgeshire. Lo
and behold I got a number in Bedford for a family Meisel.

I rang the number and a little girl answered, I asked her if I could speak to
her daddy. She said no, he is away playing golf and will not be home till
tomorrow. So I asked her if I could speak to her mummy. She said that mummy is
cooking in the kitchen and that she will call her. Mrs. Meisel came to the phone and I first
apologised for talking to her little daughter. At the time there were all kinds
of stories circulating in the papers about paedophiles telephoning like this. I
explained the above circumstance and asked if her husband was Gerhard Meisel. And to my utter surprise
she said no, but Gerhard is my father-in-law, he is my husband's father. I
timidly asked if she would have Gerhard's
telephone number and address. She answered in the affirmative and the utter
wonder is that Gerhard actually lived
a few miles from me in Edgware, in north London.

I spoke to Gerhard and from him got the details of the family Meisels relationship to the Hellers in Valasske Mezirici.

Now for this you have to open the attached genealogy of the
Flach family. The people listed with red background are victims who
were killed by the Germans in the Shoah. If you scroll down having opened the
above attachment a quarter of the way down you will find my family. In 1994,
having discovered the twelve gravestones hidden on the site of what used to be
the Jewish cemetery in Valasske Mezirici, I came home to England. My
parents-in-law, who used to live in Haifa after the war, were just visiting. I
told the story how I rediscovered the fate of the Heller family because someone had hewed
into the plinth of the gravestone of Salomon
Heller the names of the family of
JUDr. Karel Heller who was, at the time of our deportation 14th
Sept., 1942, the president of the Jewish community of Valasske Mezirici. When I
mentioned who they were one by one I came to say
Ani Heller. And my father-in-law started saying: "Ani
Heller? Ani Heller,
married to the lawyer JUDr. Karel Heller?
Why she was my cousin, the daughter of my uncle Viktor
Flach and my auntie Rosa.
It was then that we sat down and I drew the
Flach Families Diagram by the method I have developed for many other
diagrams of The Jewish Historical Clock.

Gerhard filled in for me the
information on the Heller family which
is shown half way down the diagram. The Meizels
family were from Zlin in Moravia, Gerhard's
grandfather on his father's side lent Bata money after the Ist World War when
Bata started to produce sneekers. The business became very successful and the
firmBata became a world wide concern.
Bata kept up friendly contact with the Meisel
family as the business grew. Leopold Meisel
became Finance Director at Bata and the firm also employed his brother Siegfried. The office for the Finance
Dept. of Bata was in Vienna. At the time of the Anschluss of Austria in 1938 Leopold fled to Zlin and his family came
to Valasske Mezirici. The reason they left for Eindhoven was that Bata was
relocating his busines to Holland feeling that Czechoslovakia was endangered by
Hitler. When in May 1939 Bata saw that Holland was also not safe he transfered
his business to Canada. But Bata kept faith with his eployees and obtained
visas for Leopold and his family to
the UK and for Siegfried to South
Africa.

I came to discuss with Gerhard his
cousin Hanus Meisel, who like him and
his family was missing from the many lists of victims which I had analysed. I
told him the fate of JUDr. Bedrich Heller,
his wife Marie Heller and their son Hanus Heller. I found this family also
on the police registrations of departure from Valasske Mezirici. But they went
to Prague and I found them to have been deported with the second transport from
Prague to Lodz. That led to their killing in Zamość.
Hanus'
parents obtained for him a student visa to leave for the US. Also with the help
of Bata. In 1940, when Hanus
left Prague he was 18.

In
1992 my brother Shragga
organized a get together of survivors of the Shoahh from Novy Jicin,
Czechoslovakia, the town where I was born. Just before the meeting Shragga
telephoned me that he was too ill to attend and he told me to take over his
arrangements. Shragga
had a heart bypass operation and he also had diabetes. Veins which were taken
from his foot to replace his blocked arteries worked fine, but the wound left by
the operation on his ankle would not heal because Shragga had diabetics. Shragga died a
year and a half later.

Novy Jicin was in the Sudetenland and is in Moravia.
In late September 1938 our family fled the town as refugees some 15 Km south to
Valaské Mezirící. During the meeting in Novy Jicin in 1992 I was staying with a
Czech school friend in Valaské Mezirící. Now the two towns are only 20 minutes
apart by car, but for me, in the period 1938 to 1942, Novy Jicin could have been
on another planet.

During the German occupation of Czechoslovakia Jews
were anyway not allowed to travel for most of that period. Novy Jicin became
part of Hitler's Reich because it is located in what was then termed the
Sudetenland and the border to the Czechoslovak Protectorate was, to all intents
and purposes closed.

Whilst staying with my school friend I got the idea to
research a list of the forgotten dead of Valaské Mezirící more or less to
emulate my elder brother. In all of these places we survivors have the
feeling as if we never existed.

During the rule of communism most Jewish cemeteries
were demolished, even the stones were taken into nationalized stone mason
establishments and recut for the new dead of the Czech population. In most cases
synagogues were similarly bulldozed to make room for grey apartment blocks or
schools.

I quickly made discoveries some of which evoked my
memories. I attach a file which contains
an article published in
Shemot, the journal of the Jewish Genealogical Society of Great Britain
(Vol.2, No.1, Jan. 1994). The file also contains a note which I wrote on 16th
Sept., 1993 which demonstrates how we are influenced by this absence of our
heritage.

In the article I resorted to a literary device and
likened the two children of the president of the Valasske Mezirici Jewish
community, JUDr. Karel Heller
to the rosebushes which were wrapped for the winter because the Hellers were
leaving for a trip. The paragraph at the end of the article is as follows;

Both the children were killed with
their father and grandmother on 8th March 1944 in the extermination camp,
Auschwitz, Birkenau. Mira
was not quite 7 (her name means peace).
Hana was 5 1/2 , I met
them only once about a year and a half before their deaths. The roses which
Mrs. Heller had arranged to be wrapped up in straw for the winter of 1942/43
before our arrest had probably made it through that winter.

I also enclose a list of those who were killed during
the Holocaust who came from Valasske Mezirici. In 1993 I assumed that the Hellers went
with us to Terezin on 12th Sept., 1942 and that they went on from Terezin to
Maly Trostenec near Minsk where they were killed. I prepared this list of 161
people from the following documents;

List of the BH transport Ostrava to Terezin which arrived there 18th Sept.,
1942 obtained in Prague.

List of the Jewish Community of Valasske Mezirici prepared by Dr. Karel Heller who was the last
president of the community. The list was obtained from the Valassko District
Archive in Vsetin.

Copies of the Terezin cards for the applicable people from Valasske Mezirici
obtained from Prague.

Listing of arrests by the GESTAPO for Valassko prepared by Dr. Ladislav
Baletka, the director of the district archive in Vsetin. The GESTAPO destroyed
its files before the defeat of Germany in 1945, but when they arrested people
they were held in the Vsetin jail. The jail kept accounts because they were
paid a fee by the GESTAPO for every night a prisoner was kept in the jail for
them during interrogations. It is these accounts that have been preserved in
the archive of Vsetin.

Police records of prihlaseni/odhlaseni (entry/exit) from the domicile in
Valasske Mezirici. This added a number of people to the list. When movement
was still permited up to mid 1940 many people left with various motives. Most
of these were later picked up by the sweep of the GESTAPO throughout the Czech
protectorate and their fate was traced either in the Terezin book or on the
cards either in Prague or at Bet Terezin, Givat Chaim Ichud, Israel. The
GESTAPO lifted all the files of those they arrested but left those which moved
away for one reason or another.

I am grateful to the following
people for their invaluable and selfless assistance;

* Dr. Ladislav Baletka, Director of the
district archive of Vsetin.
* Eugen Stein of Prague a genealogist with whom I had been exchanging
data for many years.
* Mrs. Reichenthalova who looks after the Terezin card index at the
Prague Jewish Community.
* Alisah Schillerova who has worked for many years at the archive at Bet
Terezin, Givat Chaim Ichud, Israel.
* Jacov Tzur (formerly Kurt Cierer) of Ostrava who looked up for
me many queries and found for me data on the death of my brother Emanuel
Honigwachs, this after 54 years have elapsed.

Without their assistace the
work could not have been done.

I
must return to the quoted paragraph above. The tabulation in the second
enclosure shows that the two children were killed in Auschwitz about a year and
a half later than I stated in my article. In doing the research it was
discovered that the card for Mrs. Anna
Heller, the wife of Dr. Karel Heller
was green and Mrs. Reichenthal
pointed out that in many cases these cards were sent by the local GESTAPO in
lieu of the person indicating as they do that the person has already been dealt
with. It was then that I realised that
Mrs. Heller was arrested with her family
sometime between 12th and 30th Sept., 1942. Her husband, her mother and children
were shipped to Terezin on 30th Sept., 1942 where they stayed till Sept., 1943.
They were shipped to the Familienlager (Family Camp) of Auschwitz/Birkenau and
gassed during the night of 7th to 8th March 1944 when the ill fated September
transports were all killed. Mrs Anna
Heller was not sent to Terezin, she was
taken to the GESTAPO in Ostrava and sent directly to Auschwitz where she was
gassed on 31st Oct., 1942. What she did or what she was accused of we may never
know.

As I write in the article in the first enclosure I met
Mrs. Anna Heller
only once just before the 14th Sept., 1942 when I delivered a letter from my
mother to Dr. Karel Heller,
her husband. As coincidence would have it my wife
Eve Honeynée
Flach is a second cousin once removed
of Mrs. Anna Heller,
as I saw her an ordinary housewife with two small children, but an Eshet Chail
of our nation.

It is possible to demonstrate from the tabulation the
policies which the GESTAPO applied in order to render us completely powerless
during the Shoahh in the Czech protectorate.

The Gestapo started to arrest Jewish individuals in
the town soon after they occupied Czechoslovakia and began to call it the
Czechoslovak Protectorate. By reference to the above listing of victims who
were killed you can see those who were removed and killed before 14th Sept.,
1942 when the remaining people of the community were taken first to
Theresienstadt and then killed. The following were removed before this final
step;

Altenstein Josef

14 Oct. 1908

10 Feb. 41

20 June 41

Auschwitz

In 1941 he was a healthy man of 43, the Gestapo
regarded him as the head of this well to do family who had been in Valasske
Mezirici for a long time. The family had been running several businesses in the
town. He was arrested on 10th Feb., 1941 taken to Auschwitz and 19 weeks later
he was dead. Note that the remaining family of three were all arrested before
the 14th Sept., 1942 and all were similarly killed.

Beer Ernst (Arnost)

14 Jan. 1910

6 Aug. 41

1 Nov. 41

In 1941 he was a healthy man of 31, the Gestapo
held about 40 young and able Jews from Valasske Mezirici and from Vsetin at the
Kinski Farm in Branky for agricultural forced labour, thus removing them from
their families and depriving them of their freedom of action. They were under
guard and strictly supervised. Branky is a village about 5 km west of Valasske
Mezirici. The Beer
family lived in Branky. Arnost
socialised with the people who were thus interned, he was arrested and
interrogated at the Gestapo in Vsetin for about two weeks, he was then sent to
Auschwitz, 7 weeks later he was dead.

His elder brother Walter was left
to look after their 70 year old mother.

Berger Josef

23. 4. 1884

suicide

16. 3. 1939

Val. Mezirící

Mr. Joseph Berger
was on the council of the Jewish Community of Valasske Mezirici . He had a shop
selling fashion furs on the town square in the prime position right next to the
town hall. On Wednesday 15th March, 1939 I was on my way to my friends the
Tochs
(both are on the list of victims). As I got to the bridge I was held up by a
convoy of military vehicles. In them were soldiers dressed in green uniforms, I
was 10 years old, I had no idea who the soldiers were. Indeed this was the
first time I had seen a motorised military column. Curiosity made me follow the
column to the town square where the column stopped and the vehicles were
parked. Nothing seemed to be happening. But from passers by I heard that the
army were Germans. I was under the arch almost opposite the Town Hall. I saw
some officers go into the shop, a few minutes later they each came out with a
fur on their arm. Successively groups of officers and then soldiers went into
the shop, I was loitering about with other children and a grown up came and told
us to go home.

It was only when I was making the list that I
discovered that during the following night Josef Berger committed suicide. He was
just the first victim of the German occupation. Later during the time of my
incarceration I saw the looting of our property which was an integral part of
German policy and here was an event which typifies the progress of the Shoah.

Fischgrund Otto

15 May 1921

11 Jan. 41

26 July 41

Auschwitz

In 1941 he was a healthy man of 20. Here is another
young man, Otto
died after six months. That is a measure of it youth and stregth helped, but
the conditions were such that almost all the early prisoners died.

Prof. Frank Viktor

24 May 1886

3 Nov. 41

??

Lodz/Auschwitz

Prof. Frank
was a teacher at the Valasske Mezirici gymnasium, a friend of Petr Jansa's
grandmother. Petr is a friend from before the Shoah and we are still in touch,
in his living room he has a painting made by Prof. Frank
when he was living in retirement. Prof.
Frank obtained a permit to move to Prague,
but the Shoah caught up with him there and he went on the transport No. 5 to
Lodz. We do not realy know whether he was shipped to Auschwitz. Possibly he
died in Lodz due to his age. He was 55 at the time of his deportation.

JUDr. Heller Bedrich

31 Aug. 1889

3 Nov. 41

3 Apr. 42

Hellerova Marie

1 July 1893

3 Nov. 41

3 Apr. 42

These were parents of Hanus Heller
whose story I already wrote about above.
Hanus their son was saved from the Shoah
but they were deported to Lodz on the transport No.5 just as
Prof. Frank above but they are known to
have been murdered because they left Lodz for the extermination camp Zamosc.

I already described the deaths of this family above
Ani
Flach was probably taken to Auschwitz
seperately because of MUDr. Arthur Flach,
her brother, he escaped to England where he was a medic in the Czech air force.
He returned to Prague after the war and it was probably he who had the details
of the above people inscribed on the plinth of Salomon Heller
which I found in 1994.

Hirsch Alfred

21 July 1866

5 Nov. 41

18 July 42

Auschwitz

left Vset. Jail 28 Feb. 42

I do not know the reason why the Gestapo interrogated
Alfred Hirsch,
aged 55 for three months in Vsetin. It may have been his relationship with
Bruno Hirsch,
see below.

JUDr. Hirsch Bruno

18 Dec. 1891

12 Mar. 40

3 Nov. 40

Buchenwald??

Vsetinska 80

left Vset. Jail 30th Mar.

Bruno Hirsch
was 49 when arrested. The pattern repeats, he was taken to Buchenwald and
died. What did he tell the Germans in Buchenwald that they got hold of his
elder brother two days later? Are these important questions, certainly they
are, but there is no way to find out the answer? All the witnesses are dead.

Dr. Honigwachs Leo

8 Sep. 1911

4 Dec. 41

??Apr. 45

Schwartzheide

This is my brother Leo, he was
president of the Zionist Student Society in the Czech University in Brno, he was
a leader of Makabi Hatzair before that. He had the contacts and he had the
capability to do something. He went to Prague and there he found that the
Germans, mainly Eichmann talked with his seniors in the Zionist movement into
cooperating to build the Ghetto Theresienstadt. A thousand three hundred and
sixtyfive young men were bamboozled by German promises that the families of
these people would be protected. The people of the Aufbaukommando transports
to Theresienstadt, over a thousand of them, found on arrival that they walked
volontarily into a jail. Of these capable and young people less than 25%
survived. The Germans of course reneged on their promise to protect the
families.

Knöpfelmacher Rudolf

25 Apr. 1881

8 Mar. 40

3 Oct. 42

Auschwitz

The
Knöpfelmacher family sought to protect
themselves by conversion to Christianity,
Ernst Knöpfelmacher and his children of the
first marriage to a Jewess were also converted. Ernst or Arnost in
Czech married a second time a Czech Christian woman. All that was irrelevant to
the Germans who acted in accordance with their own race laws. The problems of
Leo
and Alice
were political membership of the local communist youth movement. Hence the
early arrest of Leo
followed by his death.

Knöpfelmacher Ernst

14 Jan. 1892

6 May 41

12 July 41

Auschwitz

Knöpfelmacher Leo

13 Mar. 1919

14 Aug. 39

18 Sep. 39

Auschwitz

Knöpfelmacherova
Alice

9 May 1921

12 June 42

9 Mar. 44

Auschwitz

The two seniors aged 59 and 48 respectively at
the time of their arrests had a home removals business which owned trucks. They
objected when the trucks were confiscated as the Germans needed them to move
armaments to the Russian front. Rather then consider return of the trucks they
arrested the owners and eliminated them.

JUDr. Levy Karel

17 Feb. 1903

18 July 41

11 Sep. 41

Auschwitz

This lawyer
Karel Levy was 38 at the time of his
arrest. His elimination is typical to the pattern which emerges. Every young
and potentially dangerous opponent to the German regime is eliminated so that
the rest of the family become defenceless.

Meiseles Josef

9 Apr. 1910

2 Nov. 41

2 Nov. 41

Auschwitz

Meiseles Friedrich

11 Mar. 1916

11 Nov. 41

14 Nov. 41

Auschwitz

These two
Meiseles families were refugees from Poland
whom JUDr. Karel Heller
protected. Perhaps they were related to the
Meisels family from Zlin. But it appears
that the Germans extracted information on these families when they interrogated
both Mr. and Mrs. Heller.
It is difficult to imagine the resistance of the two Hellers. The
Gestapo had their small little girls as hostages. The Gestapo arranged for the
grandmother Rosa Flach
to come from Karvina to Valasske Mezirici to look after the two children whilst
the parrents were under interrogation. The grandmother then stayed with the
children right into Auschwitz where she was killed with them on the fateful 8th
March, 1944 which was the killing of the September transport to the
Familienlager.

Meiseles Rudolf

22 Aug. 1911

21 Sep. 40

8 Nov. 41

Auschwitz

Indeed I wish I knew why Rudolf was
eliminated first?

Mermelstein Samuel

10 Aug. 1911

9 Mar. 41

9 Mar. 41

Auschwitz

This was the Kantor who arrived in the town toward the
end of 1940 with his sister. In Sept., 1940 the Germans announced a new
regulation prohibiting Jewish children to be taught in the public school
system. In large towns such as Prague or Ostrava there were Jewish schools
which continued, but in small towns such as Valasske Mezirici there was a
straightforward prohibition. My mother was very worried by this prohibition and
she organised for several children to be taught privately by Ing. Erich Reichenbaum
who with his wife Selma
and stepdaughter RuthEichenbaum
and her mother Arnostka Friedetzka
came to shelter in Valasske Mezirici. My mother convinced him to give us
lessons at the synagogue. His stepdaughter Ruth was my age
and she attended the lessons as well. The Reichenbaums
with the grandmother lived in an apartment in a building on the town square
opposite the town hall. The Gestapo wanted the apartment and got to hear of the
lessons he was giving. They called him to Vsetin and gave him a warning that it
would be best for him to return to Ostrava with his family. Just then Samuel Mermelstein
and his sister arrived from the Carpathia region of the former Czechoslovakia.
My mother was not put off by the departure of the Reichenbaum
family. She soon organised that the Kantor gave us lessons. The Kantor also
held Shabat services a couple of times. When the Gestapo heard of this they
called the Kantor to Vsetin, told him that all assemblies of Jews are forbidden,
the Kantor maintained that he taught the children handicrafts and household
trades. On his return services stopped, but the lessons continued with the
pretence that we were learning sewing. We actually had sewing lessons so that
he could demonstrate that we were indeed learning household work. I can still
darn socks, do ironing, some cooking from that period. His sister took the
Gestapo visit as a warning and departed back to Carpathia. After about three
months of lessons Samuel Mermelstein
was arrested and six weeks later an urn of his ashes arrived in Valasske
Mezirici. I do not know what happened to his sister. But Ing. Erich Reichenbaum
and his wife Selma
survived and I met them in Tel Aviv in 1949. Their daughter died in
Theresienstadt of complications from jaundice, the grandmother was killed in
Auschwitz.

Quittner Oskar

29 Sep. 1905

10 Dec. 41

7 Feb. 45

Dachau

Quittner Leo

19 Aug. 1914

30 Nov. 41

16 Jan. 42

Small Fortress

These two young men were brothers, aged 36 and 27
respectively were members of the local communist party. They were arrested as
politicals and faced the inevitable end following such incarceration. The Small
Fortress of Theresienstadt was a particularly brutal prison.

Reichova Eliska/Alzbeta

6 Feb. 1863

26 Sep. 42

9 Oct. 42

Theresienstadt

Reichova Angela Lilly

1 Dec. 1901

26 Sep. 42

12 July 43

Auschwitz

I include these two women mother and daughter, aged 79
and 41 respectively for two reasons. The first is that they lived in a villa at
the Glassworks. They were the last of the Reich family
who developed the manufacture of glass in Valasske Mezirici. Even today this is
still the biggest employer in Valasske Mezirici. In the book on the Jews of
Valasske Mezirici Dr. Baletka writes about their ancestor Izák Hirschel
on p. 12 of the book. He came to Krasno/Valasske Mezirici in the second half of
the 18th century. At this time the Familianten Gesaetz (Familianten Law)
operated which prevented Jews from settling in the lands of Bohemia and
Moravia. In order to get round this law
Izák Hirschel negotiated with the noble
family Kinsky, there is a chateau in Krasno to this day which once belonged to
this Austrian noble family. The farm I mentioned in Branky where 40 young Jews
were interned for agricultural work before the 14th Sept., 1942 also belonged to
this family. Izák Hirschel
proposed to manufacture pot ash (two words) on the land holdings of the
Kinskis. At the end of the 18th century the first patent was granted in the
U.S.A. for the manufacture of pot ash which had wide use in industrial England
at the time and one can trace the origins of the Corning Glassworks in the US to
the same manufacture of pot ash in New England U.S.A. as the manufacture which
Izák Hirschel proposed
to start in Valasske Mezirici.

Actually the manufacture method proposed was already
known in ancient Egypt. It consists of disolving wood ash in a kettle and then
boiling off until there is a residue. The resulting black gunge was called pot
ash. Now this organic pot ash has been replaced by potash disolved in various
waters such as the Dead Sea in Israel. Pot ash or potash is a useful
constituent of glass manufacture. Glass is made by heating silica sand but with
the addition of pot ash or potash the melting point of sand is reduced from 2000
degrees C to about 1000 degrees C. At any rate it was Izák Hirschel
who brought this technology to Valasske Mezirici and this manufacture of glass
made the Reich
family, his descendants, immensely rich.

But the Reich
family wanted not just riches but also public recognition. They converted to
the Christian religion. In the archive in Vsetin there is preserved a letter
written by the senior Mrs. Reich
to the Gestapo pointing out the conversion to Christianity. As with the Knöpfelmacher
family this type of letter held no sway whatsoever with the German race laws.
Mrs. Reich
expresses herself particularly harshly about these dirty Jews with whom
she has determined not to associate with. But she was shipped to Theresienstadt
where she soon died of lack of food and heating, and her daughter suffered the
inevitable fate of the Jews in Auschwitz.

Reiss Max

11 Aug. 1881

9 Sep. 41

25 Nov. 41

Auschwitz

Here we have yet another man of 52 in the prime of his
life plucked away from his family and find him to die after about six weeks of
the privations in the concetration camp Auschwitz before any gas chambers were
used for the mass killings of the rest of Jewry.

Singer Emil

30 Apr. 1884

30 June 43

10 Oct. 44

Auschwitz

Fugnerova 765

N.V., March from A.

Here we have yet another convert. For some reason the
Germans left him alone till June 1943. Then having forgotten him they sent him
by Einzelweisung to Auschwitz where the apparatus finished
him off just the same.

Wessely Adolf

17 Sep. 1890

17 Sep. 41

3 Oct. 41

Auschwitz

Last but not least Adolf Wessely a
51 year old man is also removed from his family and community

The above makes 25 young, talented, proffesional or
rich persons who could have organised something called resistance. All of these
people were removed from the town before the mass deportation of 14th Sept.,
1942. That is about 15% of the total population.

In 1945 I arrived in England to join my father who had
been in London since February 1939. He sent a visa to all of us follow him, but
in August 1939 my mother decided to wait till after the holidays. At any rate
that is the explanation she gave us. My dad translated for me some of the
writings of Hanna Arend which were reported in the press in England. In 1945
she was asking the question which everybody was asking. "How come that millions
of people went into the gas chambers without resistance?" I knew the degree by
which we were softened up for the killing but not so that I could back it up, it
would be just my say so. The above analysis can be taken to represent a macro
picture to what was happening all over Europe. It shows the degree of
premeditation of the murder which the Germans perpetrated. It shows how the
young and capable were removed from us first so that by the time the mass
extermination came we were just women and children accompanied by the aged. The
Shoah was a terrible thing.

...I
write it down to identify who we are and to ensure that we are not forgotten. Do
we desire, in that respect, to emulate the gods?

Survivours of the Holocaust have an even
greater need to record their memories. We have the naive notion that we have a
message to humanity, to ensure that such events do not occur again. The message,
it appears, does not reach the evildoers, for there are further mass murders
which have occured; granted, none have been as thorough as the Germans.

I started my article in Volume 2, Number
1 of the Journal SHEMOT describing the actions of my brother Shragga, may he
rest in peace, in arranging a meeting in 1992, in Novy Jicin, Czechoslovakia of
the survivours of the Jewish community to place a commemorative tablet on our
synagogue building in order to remind the town that we were there. The Holocaust
has been successful in almost obliterating all traces that we ever existed. That
meeting in Novy Jicin was obviously not enough for my brother. He felt that a
more positive memorial was required, one that lived rather than a taof stone.

Shortly before my brother passed away he
arranged a competition at the Gymnasium in Novy Jicin for annual cash prizes to be
distributed to the pupils of this school who write essays with a Jewish theme.
As our traces are few the pupils, for the most part have never met a Jew. I have
just returned from the 1st annual award ceremony. I am pleased to translate the
essay which won the prize, it was not only an excelent essay, but it was also a
work entirely original in the search for historical source material.